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Version 1.2 of the RemotingLite has now been released. Head on over to CodePlex to get the source and binary.

In this release

This release focuses on performance improvements. Up until version 1.1 the framework just used a BinaryFormatter to serialize an entire message to and from the service host. This is now done in a much more efficient manner.
Furthermore the service host will not send method arguments back to the client unless they are passed by reference. This was just a result of poor programming.
Finally I have tuned the transport protocol a bit. All this makes the framework much more efficient.

More to come?

I wrote this framework to provide remoting for the Message Passing API. Originally I used Windows Communication Foundation but that won”t work well on Mono.NET.
The rewritten MPAPI framework is currently being tested and as that progress I learn about shortcomings and bugs in the RemotingLite framework as well, since it is being tested in a “real world” situation with multiple distributed nodes. Hence I cannot guarantee that version 1.2 is the final release.

Remote method invocation has always been an issue in software development, especially when writing distributed enterprise level applications.

The Microsoft .NET runtime supports remoting, webservices has been used for years, and with the advent of version 3.0 of the framework Microsoft introduced Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF greatly simplifies writing distributed software by encapsulating the transport mechanisms used – be it TCP, MSMQ, WS-* or some else – as well as security.

Unfortunately WCF does not run on the Mono.NET runtime, and System.Runtime.Remoting is a bit esoteric. So I have written a small framework which uses messages across a TCP channel to invoke methods remotely. The framework enables programmers to easily write distributed service oriented applications with a minimum of boiler plate code. Clients are produced by using Reflection.Emit to dynamically generate IL-code that delegates method calls to a host.

Read more and get the source and binary here.